Swim to Me

by Betsy Carter

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

It's a fresh start for Delores Walker when she boards a Greyhound bus bound for Florida. Leaving the Bronx far behind, she's headed for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, frayed roadside attraction in danger of becoming obsolete with the opening of Walt Disney's latest creation, only miles up the road. Always more suited for a life underwater, Delores joins a group of other aquatic hopefuls in this City of Live Mermaids, where she discovers a world of sequined tails and amphibious theme shows that even Disney couldn't dream up. It's in this fantastic place of make-believe and reinvention that Delores Walker becomes Delores Taurus, Florida's most unlikely celebrity.

Bringing together an eccentric assortment of outcasts, poseurs, and underdogs, this wise and poignant novel conjures up a time in America when anything was possible, especially in the Sunshine State. A story of family, chasing dreams and finding your way, Swim To Me will have you believing the impossible—even in mermaids from the Bronx.

Release date: August 1, 2007

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 280

Sample

SHE WAS TWO YEARS OLD when her mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake. Her mother insisted that instinct would prevail and that instead of sinking, she would paddle like any dog in over its head. Delores Walker always claimed she had a vivid memory of this incident. She remembered the cold and how she suspended her breath, and how she waved her hands and kicked her feet. Things got calmer when she realized that the water was carrying her. She stopped being scared. Her body moved with the flow of it, the most natural thing in the world. From then on, the water was where Delores felt most at home.

Twelve years later, over the Christmas break of 1970, Delores and her parents drove from their apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx to Winter Haven, Florida, where they went to see the famous water ski show at Cypress Gardens. Delores watched with gape-mouthed attention as the skiers in their great plumed tiaras climbed on each other’s shoulders to form pyramids, twirled in the air, and danced on one leg, all the while skittering above the water like flies. That night, her mind filled with all she’d seen, Delores lay awake in the room she shared with her parents at the Slipaway Motel. At one in the morning she was still fidgeting in her canvas cot when her mother sat up. “You having trouble sleeping, hon?” Her pin-curlers twinkled in the moon-filled room.

“Those skiers were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” said Delores. “Can you imagine wearing those costumes every day? I swear I could do that for the rest of my life.”

Her mother switched on the reading lamp and lit a cigarette. Next to her, Roy Walker was sleeping, making sounds like a little animal that’s just been stepped on. “It was pretty enough. But as they say in the movies . . .” and her mother talked through the side of her mouth, affecting a gangster accent, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Tomorrow we’re going to Weeki Wachee.”

The next morning, they got into the old Pontiac and followed a curlicue highway eighty miles northwest to the tiny town of Weeki Wachee Springs. They drove on tar roads made soft by the sun. On either side of them were swamps. Now and then, a gator would rear its head—not ready for a showdown, just checking the weather. Hot fish air filled the car. Roy had on the kind of wraparound sunglasses that Elvis wore, and a Hawaiian shirt that he’d bought for the trip. He held the wheel with one hand, and took off his Yankees baseball cap to wipe away the sweat. “What a stinkhole,” he said. Delores and her mother ignored him. They were too busy passing a vanilla Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy bar between them, biting off large hunks of the candy. “That one,” said Gail Walker, pointing to a yawning gator and dangling the candy wrapper out the window. “Look at the brown hide on him. He would make me a nice handbag and pair of shoes.” She let the wrapper fly.

They pulled into a gas station, where there was a big old Florida bear caged up next to the cans of car wax and Texaco Motor Oil. Behind the station was a hand-painted sign that said: LIVE ALLIGATOR WRESTLING. For three dollars, they watched a Seminole Indian wrestle a worn-out gator until the animal rolled over on its back. Then the wrestler rubbed a spot on its scaly stomach, and the gator went out like a light. It looked easy enough, but the guy who took their money said that only the Seminoles knew where that sleep-inducing spot was. Just before they got to Weeki Wachee Springs, they drove past an orange grove, where the air was sticky and the smell was as sweet as if it had rained honey.

This was Delores’s first time away from New York City. She’d never seen an animal in the wild, if you didn’t count pigeons. The white egrets with their long ballerina necks filled her with wonder. The limber palm trees, the gnarled mangrove swamps, even the way the heat forced itself on her was new. And then there was the water: the blue Gulf, brown swamps, green lakes. And somewhere, the ocean. Delores swam in the turquoise pool at the Slipaway Motel, a dingy little square whose bottom was slimy with algae. Still, it was water, and she had the whole thing to herself.

They drove into the nearly filled parking lot at Weeki Wachee Springs and followed the other families to the park’s entrance. In front of the gates to the park was an obelisk in the center of a fountain. On top of the obelisk was a statue of two mermaids who appeared to be spinning underwater. One held the other over her head, with one hand holding the heel of her foot and the other resting under her arched back. There was a seat shaped like a clamshell in front of the obelisk, and people, mostly women, lined up to sit on it. The women would twist and turn in the clamshell seat, then strike pinup girl glamour poses as their husbands took their photographs. Roy grabbed Delores by the arm and pulled her into the line. “Let’s show ‘em what a real mermaid looks like, eh?”

Roy Walker was a chunky man, five feet eight inches and 190 pounds. He worked at a wholesale grocery store, and his arms were thick and ropy from hauling cartons of canned beans and lard out of the trucks and onto the shelves. “Watch this,” he said, heaving Delores over his head, one hand under her back, the other holding her foot, just like the statue above them.

“Dad, quit it,” she shouted. “Put me down.” Her father shouted back. “Go on, Delores, show ‘em what a real mermaid looks like.” Instinctively, she threw back her head, arched her back and splayed her arms. She could almost feel the water around her as she forgot her embarrassment and floated in the air above her father’s head. Word rippled through the crowd, so that even the people at the ticket booth turned to see the man who had, for the moment, turned his daughter into a mermaid. Her mother stared at the two of them, her mouth slack with disbelief. She appeared to be the only person in the crowd without a camera. “That’s my daughter and my crazy husband,” she began telling the people around her. There was an elderly couple beside her. The husband kept nudging the wife with his elbow and saying, “Get a load of this,” as he shot frame after frame. The woman turned to Delores’s mother: “Don’t you have a camera of your own, dear?”

“No,” she said. “There was nothing much to photograph, until now.” The woman asked her where she lived, pulling a pen and an envelope from her purse. Gail told her they were from the Bronx.

“We’re from Baltimore. That’s not too far from New York City. If you write down your name and address, I’ll be sure to send you a print. What a nice family,” she said, smiling at Roy, whose arms were beginning to shake by now.

Finally, he lowered Delores to the ground and back to earth. “How’d you like them apples?” he asked her.

“Dad, I know I will never forget this,” she answered gravely.

Even as they walked to the amphitheater, little kids pointed and grown-ups smiled at them. One man with a wooly beard winked at Delores and said, “You looked like the real thing up there.” By the time they took their seats in the bleachers, Delores’s heart was tap dancing in her chest. Then the lights went down and the music started to play. It was “Moon River,” the jelly-sweet theme from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As the music oozed into the amphitheater, the black velvet curtain rose slowly. There was a collective intake of breath from the audience as one of the mermaids, already in the limpid blue water, swam to the edge of the aquarium. She had long blonde hair that floated like a nimbus around her, and wore a pink halter-top and pink Lycra fin that flapped to the rhythm of the current. She carried a sign that read: MERMAIDS GO TO THE MOON.

A year earlier, the Apollo 11 space mission had brought the first men to the moon. As they touched down, Neil Armstrong and his crew had played Frank Sinatra’s brisk version of “Fly Me to the Moon.” In Weeki Wachee’s homage to this historic event, the show began with a rocket blasting into space. A mermaid with long red hair and a silver lamé tail hung on to the wing as the tape recorder sputtered a scratchy rendition of a takeoff. Then came Frank and his jazzy anthem. The lady in lamé lip synched without appearing to swallow any water, while behind her, another mermaid, also in silver, played backup, snapping her fingers and thrusting her shoulders in time to the music. Two mermaids in cobalt blue tails and white helmets did somersaults and pirouettes around some Mylar stars and planets. A tortoise floated by.

Delores could feel what it would be like to be underwater with them: the weight was gone from her arms, her body felt buoyant. She felt herself lulled by the soft, rolling rhythm. Time slowed down, as it does in that moment between waking and dreaming. Every second was filled with different colors, depending on where the sun hit the water. Things happened: one mermaid drank from a bottle of RC Cola, another blew wet bubbly kisses to the audience. When one of the mermaids peeled a banana and then ate it, her father whispered something to her mother, who then giggled. Her father could be so funny at times. Her mother had rolled her eyes and whispered back: “Roy, you old turd, get your mind out of the gutter.” But maybe because the words of the lady from Baltimore were still fresh in her mind—“nice family”—she’d also squeezed his arm and held on to it.

The images melded with the harmony of colors; mermaids and water became one. Delores saw the mermaids occasionally suck air from the air hoses that were hidden behind the scenery. Even so, she was dizzy with the illusion that what she was seeing was real.

For their grand finale, all the mermaids gathered around a moon rock. One pulled an American flag from beneath her fin and planted it in the ground. A tinny version of “God Bless America” rose up through the amphitheater as the mermaids stood on their tails and saluted the flag.

Delores hoped nobody noticed the tears sliding down her cheeks. She stayed fixed in her seat, worried that if she stood up, she might break into pieces. There was no name for what she was feeling, only this certainty: whatever she had to do, wherever she had to go, one day Delores Walker would become one of those mermaids.

After the show, they checked into the Best Western motel across the street. Her father seemed so strong and robust that night and her mother was more flirtatious than she’d ever seen her. They decided that, this being their last night in Florida, Delores would stay in a separate room next door. There was a bolted door between them. “Just knock if you get scared, hon,” her mother had said. But by the way her father raised his eyebrows, and her mother turned away with a smirk, Delores knew that unless someone broke into her room and put a rope around her neck, she was to stay as far away from that door as possible.

That was a happy time.

It turned out her parents would never forget that magical day either, partly because on that magical night, another Walker was conceived. Nine months after their trip to Weeki Wachee, Delores’s brother West was born. Named after the motel in which he was conceived, West Walker was thick and stubby, just like his dad. He slept in Delores’s room, and at night, she would sing to him or talk to him as though he understood what she was saying. He never complained, even when she dressed him up in old doll clothes and wheeled him around in a toy baby carriage that she’d kept from childhood. She started calling him Westie.

For a while, the Walkers seemed like any other happy family. Her father would toss West in the air and say things like, “How’s my buddy boy?” He’d tuck him under his arm like a football and run across the room shouting, “It’s the great halfback from the Grand Concourse, WEST WALKER.” As fast as he could, West would wriggle away from him until Delores’s father would give up and pass him off to her mother. Eventually, her father stopped treating him as a football. “He’s a real mama’s boy,” he’d say to Delores. “Too bad it didn’t turn out the other way. You shoulda been a boy, he shoulda been a girl.”

On winter afternoons, particularly on Sundays, Delores would get a hollow feeling inside her. It was a gnawing ache, as if her in-sides were concave. She knew it best by its absence, the times when she did not feel like the loneliest person in the world.

A little more than two years after the Weeki Wachee trip, on a late Sunday afternoon, Delores, Westie, and their parents were holed up in their Bronx apartment. Outside, the low March clouds were the color of dirty sheets. Inside, the smell of liver covered every inch of the house like fresh paint. After reading in Teen Girl that bangs “were a pick-me-up for any kind of face,” Delores locked herself in the bathroom and took a pair of scissors to her brown, straight hair. She needed a pick-me-up.

She wet her hair and combed it down in front of her face. The scissors made a snipping noise as dark brown ribbons filled the sink. In the background, she could hear her father say something in a gruff voice. Her mother yelled back: “Liver, what’dya think it was?” West was playing on the floor of their room. Delores didn’t hear what her father said, only the sound of a door slamming. Often when her parents fought, Delores would run a bath and lie there with her head underwater so she wouldn’t hear them screaming. Now, the pounding on the door made that impossible.

“Delores,” her mother shouted. “You and me and West might as well eat dinner. Your father has picked this moment to lock himself in the bedroom. I swear, that man is dumber than a slotted spoon.”

“Ugh, liver again?” Delores asked her mother.

“Liver is a delicacy, Miss Snotnose,” her mother shot back. “Not everyone knows how to prepare it so well.”

Liver stuck in Delores’s throat like a wad of mud. She was sure her mother cooked it just to be spiteful. Delores and her father would watch with disgust as her mother would cut her liver into jewel-sized pieces, then say to her family, “Liver is a specialty in France. The way I have a natural taste for it, it wouldn’t surprise me if I had some French blood in me.” Then she’d stab a piece of the meat with her fork, shove it into her mouth, and make smacking noises as she chewed out loud.

There was no use getting into a fight about it. If Delores or her father refused to eat her liver, her mother would cry, then rush into the bathroom, where she would make loud retching sounds. Delores knew what her father meant when he said he felt “like a trapped mutt.” Sometimes it seemed to her that her life would never get any bigger than this; that she would never get out of here.

When her father finally did come out of the bedroom, his fists were clenched at his sides as though at any second he might reach for a gun. He walked toward the kitchen, never taking his eyes off the piece of liver lying on his plate. He stood over the table and in one sweep, picked the piece of liver off his plate and chucked it against the kitchen wall.

The history of the Walkers’ marriage was written in food stains. “Cockroaches eat better than this,” he shouted. “I’m going out to get some real food.” Westie started bawling. Her father grabbed the car keys and his Yankees cap and headed out the door. Delores was left at the table with West as her mother ran to the bathroom. Part of her wished she could leave with her father. West’s eyelashes were lacquered with tears; there were puddles of strained carrots on his bib. He looked fenced in and miserable in his high chair. Poor kid, at eighteen months old, he was even more trapped than she was. She pointed to the plum-colored stain that the liver had left on the wall. “Look, Westie, isn’t that pretty?” Then she crouched down next to where the liver had landed on the floor. It lay there curled like a glove.

She picked Westie up out of his high chair, and showed him the shriveled piece of meat. “How do you like that?” she said, holding him on her knee as she wiped the snot from his nose. “Liver bounces.”

“Ous,” said Westie. The word came out in little bubbles.

Just then, her mother came back into the kitchen. Water was dripping from her chin.

“I try so hard to please. And this is the thanks I get,” she said, pointing to the meat stain. “I don’t deserve this.” She started to cry.

“Mom,” said Delores, still on the floor with Westie. “Do you know that liver bounces?”

“Ous,” shouted West. “Ous,” he said again, kicking his legs.

Her mother cried harder. “Do I deserve this?”

“No, Mom,” said Delores, staring ahead at the flesh-colored walls and the balding shag rug. “Nobody does.” Delores hated her mother in the way only a teenage girl could hate her mother. She hated her for being whiny and self-pitying. She hated herself for not being more sympathetic and felt guilty about envying her father’s ability to up and leave.

“Why don’t you go watch Glen Campbell?” Delores said. “I’ll feed Westie and clean up.”

Her mother blew her nose then went into the living room to watch her favorite TV show. Delores put Westie back into his high chair and sang the “Ugly Duckling” song to him as she cleared the table. West loved it when she came to the quacking part: “. . . and all the birds in so many words said QUACK, the best in town, QUACK QUACK, the best, QUACK QUACK, the best, QUACK QUACK, the best in town . . .” He would spit, thinking he was quacking as well, and laugh as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

West and Delores joined their mother on the couch, and they were well into Bonanza when her father came back. He was carrying a grease-stained carton of Chinese food. Because he had been drinking beer, his words came out like mashed bananas. “This is real food. Taste it,” he said, scooping out a clump of chow mein and holding it up in front of them. Her mother smacked his hand away, and the food flew into the armrest of the worn lime green sofa. West wailed as she sponged away at some water chestnuts.

“The two of you are nuts,” said Delores.

“Believe you me,” said her mother, “if I could afford a lawyer, I’d call one tonight.”

Her father threw a dime at her feet. “Whatcha’ waitin’ for? Call one.”

Her mother lobbed the dime at his head. “I wouldn’t waste this precious money on you.” Westie was shrieking now, and even Delores began to cry. Again, her father reached for his Yankees cap and shoved the car keys in his pocket. “Gotta get out of this insane asylum,” he said, stepping over the pool of soy sauce and cornstarch that was spreading on the beige broadloom.

DELORES LAY ON HER BED next to Westie in his crib. She tried singing the “Ugly Duckling” song to calm him down. He was hiccuping in between his sobs. She sang “Thumbelina,” and used her thumb to act out the words. She pulled Otto, a little white hand puppet she’d had for years, out of the shoebox and held him up in front of his face. “Hi,” said Otto in a funny squeaky voice. “Please don’t cry. Delores and I will take care of you.” Finally, the hiccups subsided. He tried to keep his eyes open, but soon he grudgingly fell asleep. His fist lay balled against his cheek and his curly blond hair was matted from all the tears. He looked angelic and at peace. Delores gently moved a damp curl from his forehead. She closed her eyes and did the thing she did when she wished that she were somewhere else. She lay as still as possible and willed herself underwater. After a while, she could feel the water undulating around her, feel her foot brushing up against a wisp of sea grass and the blast of fish scuttling past her. She could even hear the lapping sound of it. She imagined she was swimming without needing to take a breath. On this night, Westie swam beside her, his chubby legs moving as slowly as a turtle’s. “Swim Westie,” she shouted. “Swim away.”

She was talking in her sleep, and the effort of it rocked her awake. She looked over at Westie, who was sprawled on his stomach. Outside, she could hear the sound of the TV. According to her alarm clock, it was after eleven. She went into the living room, where she found her mother sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. Her mother studied the floor as she exhaled: “You might as well go to bed, Delores. He’s not coming home tonight.”

She was right about that. Her father didn’t come home that night or any night after that.

The air in the bus smelled like the inside of a suitcase: stale and used. Delores got on the bus early to make sure she had a window seat. Through the opaque windows she could see her mother waving. She didn’t wave back, and when the bus pulled out from the station, she kept her eyes forward until she was on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. Alone in her seat, she pulled out her suitcase and unpacked Otto, who was wrapped carefully in a pair of her pajamas. Otto was a puppet with a white ceramic clown head that her father bought her the time they went to the Barnum and Bailey Circus in Madison Square Garden. It was one of the few times she and her father ever went anywhere alone.

At intermission, when he told her she could buy anything at the circus that didn’t cost over five dollars, Delores chose the puppet with a bald white head because, even though he had a red dollop of paint on his nose, he also had a rhinestone teardrop under each eye and the sad demeanor of someone pleading, “Get me out of here.” Delores recognized him as a kindred spirit, and she picked him with the intention that one day they would be able to help each other.

On days when she felt particularly lonely, she’d take Otto out of the shoebox where he lived and occupy his frumpy puppet’s body with her fingers. She’d tell Otto things about school or her parents—things she wouldn’t tell anyone else. Then she’d twist her voice into a high pitch and listen as Otto told her how pretty she was. “Someday, Delores,” he’d say, “you and me, we’ll live by the ocean. You’ll swim all day. You’ll be tan and beautiful and the most popular girl anyone ever knew.”

She would have liked to keep Otto on her lap, liked to hold on to something that was hers, but it was weird enough being alone on the bus. A bald puppet with rhinestone teardrops would only call attention to her. So she packed up Otto again, this time between her suede fringed jacket and the satin green miniskirt her mother had given her. Delores had stuffed her money, along with a return ticket and the letter inviting her to Weeki Wachee, inside Otto’s hollow head—a small comfort. His sad eyes were looking down on her. “We’ll be okay,” she wanted to call out to him. “This is what we’ve always wanted. You’ll see.” She tried to contain her thoughts, knowing that if she allowed herself to think about Westie she would cry. Better to stare straight ahead, holding on to the brown paper bag that her mother had packed with sandwiches and other food that she promised would keep overnight.

The world slid by, turning from the buds of early spring into the soothing green pines of Virginia and the Carolinas. She ate one of the sandwiches along with an apple and some Chips . . .